not just game, but also novel, my idea is that some scientist try to create a portal to take water from water rich moon (such as ganymede) to solve world thirst, but inadvertently take too much water and flood earth instead
I was thinking this too! It would make a great futuristic world map for a game, after some kind of disastrous mistake caused Earth to have WAY more water in the oceans than it should have!
also think of the kinds of oceanic creatures that would evolve on a planet like this, where most of the surface was covered by deep ocean with very few land masses... Gets the imagination going!
if sea levels were that high for millions of years, the landscape would of course look different because erosion and sedimentation cause landmass to "accumulate" at or around the altitude of sea level (in addition to different climate patterns causing different rates of erosion). areas much higher get eroded, and their sediments are deposited in deltas, increasing the amount of land that is near sea level. if you look at a graph that shows the total area of land on earth at a particular altitude, you will spot a distinct spike around sea level because that's where sea level has been ±100m for hundreds of millions of years. check out the same graph for mars and see if you can spot a spike that might represent what sea level could have been over there back when mars still had water
Wikipedia says that sea level has oscillated every ~100k years from (roughly) -50 to +250 meters over the last 500 million years :) Your comment did make me think about how those deltas with/of eroded materials would be affected by ice ages. It would mean that there are a lot more deltas under water, right? So that's a lot of comparatively shallow sea, which boosts marine life (/biomass). And then, as sea level rises, we'd also expect the places that are 50 to 100 to 150 meters above sea level to look like deltas, too... Google says that, for the last 2.6 million years, there usually was an ice age of 90k years and then a warm period of 10k years, so the currently-underwater deltas should be quite dominant! However, I have _no idea_ whether erosion would just wipe it all out, over such time scales.... Anyhow, thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole 😂👍🏼
Yeah, the difference would be that the earth would be a little bit less dense and maybe there would be the same amount of continents but it would look totally different And there would be a lot of volcanism
@@MrNicoJac Ice ages would probably affect sea levels a lot less in that world though, since there's _way_ less land -- especially in polar and subpolar regions -- for ice sheets to collect on. Sea ice doesn't affect sea level much at all, since it displaces as much water as it melts to become.
I'll be honest, I never really paid much attention to the rivers in Asia, but after watching this video I found it fascinating that major tributaries of the Brahmaputra River (1806 miles long, then flows into the Ganges-Padma River (1569 miles long)), the Irrawaddy River (1422 miles long), the Salween River (2044 miles long), the Mekong River (3051 miles long), and the Yangtze River (3900 miles long) all start or pass within a strip of land 130 miles wide. The two furthest discharges are about 1950 miles apart as the raven flies, or around 5200 miles (4524 nautical miles) by sea.
Living in Mexico in the central valleys, as soon as I started watching your interesting video, I began to realize that in this dystopian future, Mexico would be the country that would conserve the largest percentage of its territory in the world. Assuming that the event happened in a short time, Mexico would also keep its main cities since several of them are located above 2,000 meters, so I think that this would be the only way we would become a world power :)
Going to get in early rather than watch the video before commenting, because I absolutely love the concept and I want to see a follow-up video: What if the sea level was a lot LOWER? Not the 100-200m of an ice age, but 500 or 1000 meters, or maybe even more.
Yes! Great idea, I mentioned this to my dad(this video) and then he was talking about if the water was lower how the oceans has tons of mountains and basins. Very fascinating. Love your channel!!!!
There's a Stephen Baxter novel called Flood that is pretty fascinating. Follows a group of people as the seas rise like this, mostly because of water trapped beneath/in the crust finally breaking free and being forced up into the ocean by the weight of the plates, I think.
"Flood" doesn't actually explain where the water came from, but leaves it open for the sequel. Which also doesn't explain. On the plus side, Baxter does argue the case that with extremely elevated sea levels the climate would be much warmer, which is relevant to this video.
@@pembrokeshiredan I remember watching an Anton video, where he said that over the course of 4.5B years, the Sun has stripped away about an ocean's worth of water from the surface of the Earth through breakdown of the H2O molecules (which is still happening today), and the hydrogen escaping Earth's gravity. Perhaps that's where the water came from if this never happened? Although the oxygen levels might be different if all of that broken-down water didn't leave its oxygen behind.
@@illegal_space_alien Earth actually have more water inside the mantel. The ringwoodite trapped about 2/3 of total water in Earth. This facts actually suggest why Earth have plat tectonic movement, it being assists by the water among the mineral in the mantel. Theoretically, if Earth have a massive earthquake affected the whole world, the mantel would be less dense and volcanic eruption would happen in global scale. This will also depressurize the ringwoodite and release the water inside the mineral, and Earth will have 3x more water than in the ocean right now.
@@illegal_space_alien Hey, another Anton Petrov watcher! :) Good to see my peeps here. (Not THAT surprising--if you like one sciencey educational channel you might like others.) Anyway, two things I've learned from this: 1) I'd apparently be fine (in terms of drowning/not drowning, anyway) right where I am, if this suddenly just up and happened, and 2) I have a new sci-fi book to read. :)
@@illegal_space_alien We also get water from space. Comets are just dirty snowballs, so if they come down, we get more water. Also hydrogen inside the Earth combines with oxygen to get more H²O.
Except it would be a whole small continent if sea levels were always 2000m higher not just a few peaks. The world would have vastly more land than in this video because erosion doesn't really cut away land to much below sea level, and runoff deposits sediment along coasts, plus erosion gets less intense with shallower slopes. So yeah, there'd be a whole content in Appalachia. There might even still be land masses from 1-2+ billion old mountains that might once have existed across the plains so the continent could have been even larger and possibly connected to the rest of North America.
Maybe some pygmy moose aswell, they can swim for lomger than our mental health is prepared for, dive deeper on a breathhold than some divers on trimex and have a very "heads on" approach towards threats.....literally.
Oceanographer here, this was a great video! I especially like how it leads to open ended questions for thinkers of all disciplines. In my case, I would like to point out that the lack of substantial continental boundaries would lead to more energetic, circumplanetary annular currents at many latitudes. Currently, we only have this in the Southern Ocean in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The shallow seas in North America and the Andes would likely still allow for western boundary currents, but there would doubtless be a lot of interesting interaction between water masses on either side of the archipelago, much like we see today between the Pacific and Indian oceans being connected through Indonesia. Needless to say, all terrestrial climate would be some variety of oceanic, save for maybe the most sheltered of Tibetan uplands, while monsoons wouldn't exist due to a lack of large landmasses, which are involved in that climate process. There's also the question of sea ice dynamics in the absence of continents, as well as the effect of a water world albedo on climate regulation compared to today's 30% land paradigm. This whole thought exercise would be an interesting problem to tackle with a coupled general circulation model.
By the way, if you ever do a follow-up on this from an oceanographic standpoint, or do a completely different ocean-heavy video, I'd be happy to provide help! (proofing, feedback, etc.)
@@TAP7a Same! The problem is, such a necessarily global model would require a lot of computer time to run, and considering this is of basically no value to the kind of oceanography funding agencies care about, it would be hard to get it up and running as a proper study. On the other hand, exoplanet research might benefit from it, seeing as Earth already has real bathymetry, which means we wouldn't have to guess it or approximate it away in order to model a semi water world planet. At the very least it could be a good undergraduate senior thesis
@@john9982 I do not think so. In this scenarion there is still extra 2000 meter tall water column pushing on them. And ice is less dense e.g. lighter than ice, so pressure on the landmass would be even higher IMHO.
I feel like this setting with tibet would be very interesting for how a civilization would start on it and grow. If there was a landmass like this surrounded by water. They’d have some flat lands good for building, lots of lakes and ponds, and they’d be sheltered by mountains all around. And then there’s those mountain range like islands north of them which could be later explored. Would be cool to have as a map in one of those games like that where you make a civilization
@Mal_31 nah your right if the water rose then rain would rose too since many storms that happen is under that 2000m so rain would land on top where it was normally frozen eroding a little faster and flatten out the bases for more plains like area
I dropped a more comple response to this elsewhere but for example those 3 fjords wouldn't exist in a world that had 2000m higher sea level because that's the level where deposited sediment would overtake erosion and those would be river valleys near sea level instead of deep fjords. Just one tiny problem among countless issues this simplitic view of geology produces.
I'd like to see the effects of sea level if we swapped the altitude of the tallest mountain with the depth of the bottom of the ocean - ie. if the sea level dropped so that Challenger deep, currently at -10,971m, was now only -8,848m - this is just a bit more than 2000m of sea level drop, so would be a pretty good companion to this video. I'd also like to speculate on the ecology of my home country, NZ, in the scenario of +2000m: it wouldn't change much. It'd still be an isolated group of islands dominated by birds who could fly/swim here then diversify into various niches that are filled by mammals elsewhere. There'd be significantly less land, and there would be little variety in climate among the land that remains, so there would be less biodiversity overall.
not to be pedantic, but the Rocky Mountains in North America are above 2000 meters - the lowest point is 7630 feet or 2325 meters. I live in the foothills of the Rockies and the idea of moving a few miles west, and having great beach front property to boot, is very appealing.
I don’t understand the basis for his video. Lots of area is higher than 6500 ft above sea level. Seems like an odd thing to get wrong right off the bat and it turns me off from this video and the rest of his content.
We’re getting into territory that’s really hard to predict, but with so much extra water, wouldn’t the different distribution of weight on the tectonic plates cause them to move differently anyways? Tibet, the Andes, the Rockies and so on might not even form if all the extra water was here from the beginning. So this makes a fun exercise if the earth suddenly got an extra 2km depth of water, but god knows what the landmasses would develop like if we started with the extra water.
Also planets bulge at their equator due to rotational forces, and adding any extra mass on top of that would itself be subject to that same bulge, so adding a uniform 2 km of water across the surface of the earth would redistribute itself to be less than that at the poles and more than that at the equator. It would never be as simple as just adding 2,000m to sea level worldwide, even disregarding differences due to long-term factors like erosion and effects of pressure from different weight distributions.
I calculated 859,074,600,000,000 tons of additional weight due to all that water. Seems like it would make a huge difference and sink all the current continental plates and eventually they would become oceanic plates as well. Only places like Hawaii built on oceanic plates would survive I think.
I am a professional geologist and I want you to know that I love this so so so much. This seriously made my day and I will be subjecting everyone I know that would be even remotely interested to it.
It's fun until you start thinking about how erosion would have proceeded differently if sea levels were 2000m higher, how volcanic islands would have built higher as well. And how less effective erosion of ancient mountains would have allowerd future orogenies to uplift much greater areas about these higher seas.
Tectonic processes would be significantly altered by this much water, just the weight of it alone would alter how the rocks of the crust move, fold etc. At some point too much water might even shutdown plate tectonics as we know it. Ultimatly land and water are intimatly connected an one can't be altered without effecting the other.
The average density of the lithosphere (which makes up the most of the plate-material) is around 3g./cm³ and is, in the large majority of areas, significantly more than 2km. thick, so the weight of the water you're adding on top of them is a fraction of their own weight. The calculation shows that a block of the lithosphere that is one kilometer by one kilometer and two kilometers thick will weigh approximately 6 billion metric tons; 2000 meters of water on top of that is a third the weight. Given that the density of the material underlying the lithosphere is *greater* ... and that the lithosphere may well be thicker than 2 kilometers (& thus weigh even more) - how much subsidence can you expect? People who aren't used to it, have problems conceptualizing measurements where 500,000,000 tons isn't really all *that* big a number, but when doing astronomical calculations (masses of large asteroids and the like) ... meh ...
@@ephennell4ever There was major tectonic shifting at the end of the last Ice Age with the meltwater pulses raising sea levels to around their current position. Northern North America lost it's ice sheet and due to the relief of all that weight, raised up a few thousand feet. The African continent has risen 1500 feet since then. So you saying this much water would not affect plate tectonics is inaccurate. One thing you seem to be forgetting is, while the Lithosphere is dense and the magma underneath it is denser (as you would expect moving toward the center of mass), magma is a fluid and therefore more compressible, allowing it to be forced to move by increased mass above it.
@@ephennell4ever You just proved yourself wrong while still being right lol. You’re completely correct but you forgot that the water gets compressed and weighs more at lower depths, to be honest both the water and plates will end up weighing similar amounts due to the same process of pressure
Atlas pro:"If sea levels were to rise for about 70 meters it wouldn't alter the layout of the planet all that much". Me being dutch:"Bro, my entire country just disappeared".
Tibet and the Andes are great but I feel like there could've been more stress on the archipelagos that remained(like the Cordillera archipelago you talked about). It would be a great showing of what island specific phenomena are out there as there would be islands in the most diverse of places. Also I feel like 1000m while not as extreme would also be very interesting. Great vid!
I love this speculative biogeography! Honestly, if you do go further down this path, you might even want to make a colab with the "Curious Archive", YT channel dedicated to studying the speculative biology of games as well as art projects and books. Could be very interesting seeing you two together
The quality of these videos is just magnificent. I really don't know why more people don't watch you. You explain concepts like this so clearly and in such a fun way, i don't feel bored in trying to remember all the points, i just have fun and i learn. Its hard to do that and you have done it. Very underrated
@@cruz7579 what if its not cringe? what if its just that people dont care to enjoy what he does and only care about the fact that sure he talks in a kinda cringy american accent. the internet is full of shit, so people who look at shit would be convinced that everything here is shit, but this guy isn't. i have no idea if that made sense
As a Mexican I would love a video about the geography, geology, biology and ecology of Mexico, as one of (if not the most) diverse country in the continent with every climate except for the polar one
He's talked about our country in his 7 realms of biogeography video; an honorific mention as a great transitional zone between the Neoartic and the Neotropical realms. If you take a road trip from the Mexican highlands through either one of the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, and head to the coast, you'll witness an outstanding change in flora and weather that really makes oneself feel like traveling a colossal distance when you're actually just traversing a couple hundred kilometers as the crow flies.
Too many people have no idea what Mexico is like. I sing its praises to all that listen. Too many are shocked to find it's in North America. I can't think of a South or Central American country that I haven't at one time or another had to tell someone wasn't a place in Mexico, so it's not surprising though you'd think that would mean people wouldn't think its one big desert.
Toluca is almost one of those cities of eternal spring, just far enough from the equator to have a winter and should never feel like a steam bath (like Florida) due to the elevation
It reminds me of a web project I saw a while ago that investigated different environments called the Planetocopia. It had several categories including several modifications to earth: one particularly significant one being changing the location of the poles, including: Seapole: Both poles are located in the ocean. Shiveria: Both Poles are located on land. Turnovia: Poles are reversed, inverting ocean currents. Jaredia: Relocating the poles to create a more habitable and societally unified Earth.
Underwater geography would be cool. Like what’s up with the massive amount of sunken islands, seamounts, and underwater volcanoes there are. I think we get so caught up with what’s happening on land that we forget that most of earths geography is underwater
I think it could be an interesting experiment to take the height map of the Earth and invert it, so the highest points become the deepest. Then flood it with either the same amount of water Earth currently has, or with just enough to have the current percentage of dry land.
You would find hundreds of islands where present day Taiwan is, as there are at least 269 peaks over 3000 meters, and another 38 over 2900 meters tall. Some of these islands will be connected, since the ridges are also likely over 2000 meters tall. It's the result of the Philippine Sea Plate ramming into the Yangtze Plate.
I find it really interesting to imagine humanity trying to survive an apocalyptic event such as this, with some major cities like La Paz, Bolivia being able to remain unscathed, while most others are hundreds of meters below sea level.
'In Plain Sight' seems like a great name for a series where you work through places in the world that we don't realize are x, y, z and how changing just one thing about the earth (in this case sea levels) showcases what they truly are.
An interesting thought would be how Antartica would (slowly) rise when the weight of the thick layer of ice would have disappeared. The same process which is still happening in Scandinavia. This is a place where new land could possibly form and animals which arrive here could become giants. While everywhere else the fauna would most likely shrink down in size.
Apparently I have the memory of a goldfish; I just remembered that glaciers push continents downward & affect the elevation of the land beneath them, that was literally the case with Scandinavia, ignore what I originally commented
Thank you for saying "If all the ice in Antarctica melted" not "The arctic". I took oceanography and I'm very, very tired of the disinformation being pumped out pretending that if the north pole melted, sea levels would change in volume. For those wondering, the south pole is ice sitting on a continent, while the north pole is just floating ice. Free-floating ice doesn't increase volume of the body it sits in when it melts. The reason it was floating in the first place was because it was displacing it's own mass already.
Loved this video, always a treat. You mentioned deserts, but I don't expect any world with this little land would actually have any. Anything out of the tropics would likely have a "New Zealand-like" climate.
It really depends on how you define a desert. The Ka'ū Desert in Hawaii is on the leeward side of the island and experiences a rainshadow, though most of the lack of vegetation comes from volcanic-based acid rain. The Andean continent would certainly experience a rainshadow as well, as it does currently. And they would also likely have polar deserts down in the remnants of Antarctica if the temperatures remained anywhere near the current ones ( though this is unlikely). There may not be any true deserts, but there would certainly be areas of much lower precipitation.
@@BonaparteBardithion would arid climate be possible with that narrow of piece of landmass tho? I gather that with the proximity from the sea the air current would always reach the most inward land area carrying rain.
@@amirulhakim9898 Semi-arid could certainly be possible just taking wind direction into account. But that's assuming that weather patterns in any way still resemble our current ones with that much moisture in the air.
The Cape Verde Islands (Cabo Verde) in the Atlantic have an arid climate today. There is a rain shadow effect on the higher islands (all of volcanic origin) creating micro climates, but the main problem is that the sea air at that latitude doesn't reliably carry much moisture. The islands are at the same latitude as the southern edge of the Sahara desert. In most years the winds don't carry enough moisture for the uplift over the islands to cause much precipitation. Indeed, in some years there is severe drought, which has causing periodic famines in the islands' roughly 550 year recorded inhabited history. The dry air isn't primarily caused by the presence of the nearby Sahara desert, which would disappear in this water Earth scenario (the tops of the highest Cabo Verde mountain peaks would remain). Rather it is the Hadley Cell nature of atmospheric circulation of the entire planet which causes both the Sahara desert and the fluctuating, irregular but generally very arid Cabo Verde climate. Some similar type of circulation would inevitably also exist on water Earth. Basically the sun heats the ocean more at the equator than at the poles, so the atmosphere is set in motion by this. Hot wet air therefore rises from the sea surface at the equator and moves north and south. But it starts cooling, and water precipitates out, forming the generally wet regions around the equator. By about 20 degrees north and south the air is dry again and falling, creating dryer high pressure conditions on most of the planet in the 20 to 40 latitude band on today's world. Most of the present world's deserts lie within this band. Cabo Verde lies just to the south, the islands scattered around latitude 16 degrees north of the equator, where the boundary between the rising wet and falling dry air cells lie. Most of the time it is on the dry side, but it sometimes gets bursts of sudden downpours which is why anything grows there at all. This boundary zone extends around the planet at the same latitudes north and south of the equator. It moves around a bit and brings unpredictable weather. In the water Earth scenario there still would presumably be Hadley circulation cells and such boundaries between them. But the absence of most of today's continents might produce a more regular pattern with smoother transitions. So perhaps the bits of Cabo Verde's mountain peaks poking out of the water, perhaps from just today's Fogo island, would experience a more regular climate. Would this be wetter or dryer? If the circulation pattern was smoother, the boundary zone might be narrower, putting the islands more reliably on the wetter, equatorial side of the line, where their latitude suggests they should be. On the other hand, the maximum height of the islands projecting out of the water would be reduced by 2000 metres, leaving only at most 800 metres of elevation to generate relief rainfall. So the remnant islands would probably be less parched, and perhaps boasting a few rivers and streams, but probably not drenched and covered in rainforest. Edit: I have decided I don't understand the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), which had a bit part in the preceding analysis, now deleted. Most accounts of Cabo Verde's climate mention the ITCZ, which moves around nearby threatening various calamities including tropical storms and drought.
More water >> more strong current>> more storm >> wetter earth >> more erosion from rain >> flatter land mass with growing out by sediments; More water >> more weight >> more stress on tectonic plates >> more eruption >> new land emerged
A video on how the Amazon was formed would be very interesting. From the original Amazonian craton with the river running from east to west and flowing into the Ecuadorian Pacific coast to the uplift of the Andes, with the formation of the Pebas Sea and its subsequent drainage to the northwest and west in the current basins of the Orinoco River and Amazon River respectively (after a small rise of the Vaupés arch of hills in the southwestern part of the Guianian shield which separated the waters of both basins and created the current white sands forests in the ancient beaches of the Pebas Sea). Additionally, this upheaval of the Andes in Colombia with its three mountain ranges (first the central one of volcanic origin due to subduction, then the western one due to subduction and finally the eastern one also due to folding due to subduction) and two inter-Andean valleys (product of pauses in the subduction of the Pacific plate under the Amazonian craton) divided the Amazonian fauna into a cis-Andean group (on the current side of the Amazon) and another trans-Andean (on the western side of the Andes and which includes the inter-Andean valleys of Cauca and Magdalena and the Colombian Caribbean coast) within what is today one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet: the biogeographic Chocó (in the Colombian-Ecuadorian Pacific). Many of the bird species that inhabit both sides are very similar after allopatric speciation. For example, the Amazonian Pteroglossus pluricinctus is very similar to the Pacific Pteroglossus torquatus. The same happens with Cephalopterus ornatus and penduliger from the Amazonian and Pacific side respectively. The list is huge and could give you many more examples if you decide to make a video on this topic that includes tectonic processes, orogeny of the Andes, origin of Amazon and Orinoquía, evolution of sister species of birds and an explanation of why Colombia is the country with the largest number of species of birds in the world. I have some nice articles about every item and never seen a video about it in youtube! PS: the epilogue of this story is the collision of Panama against Colombia creating the bridge that allowed the exchange of species between North and South America.
If this scenario were going to happen suddenly today, I find it interesting that the biggest cities that would survive would be Mexico City, Bogotá, Addis Ababa, Sana'a and Quito. I had expected all of them, except for Sana'a. I didn't know it was so high above sea level. On another note, the tibetan landmass looks a lot like Roshar from the Stormlight Archive. I wonder if Sanderson had his inspiration for Roshar after a thought experiment like this one.
I think the 'most interesting' sea level biologically would be that which puts as much of the earth as possible between 0 and 200 meters underwater. I haven't the first clue how to figure out what that level would be, but if you've got the ambition to tackle that one I'd love to see what you come up with.
Sea levels were an average 170 metres higher in the cretaceous than today. there was little to no ice at the poles and continents were not having that high mountains as today.
Hey now I'm sure many others would pay $ to see a multiple hundred hours long video of you guessing what each and every single islands biogeography would be like on this form of earth, but yeah that would take forever love the vid m8
5:55 - fun fact: "Hengduan" in Chinese means "cutting horizontally," suggesting that these North-South mountains have posed a significant challenge for travellers going East-West.
Assuming anything like Humanity would evolve on this world, and assuming the human equivalent involves in the same location as us, the homeland of humanity would be in the Ethiopian archipelago. I'm unsure exactly how large of a population this could Foster, and if they do get seafaring, and go exploring and island-hopping like the early Polynesians, probably with a large population up in the Turkish archipelago before heading east if they ever run across Tibet their population would explode. I don't know if they would ever have the technology until steamtech to actually get to the Andean continent, but if by some miraculous chance they do headed towards what we would refer to as the new world, they're more likely to run into the Rockies and Mexican archipelagos first as there are roughly on the same or similar latitude.
@@cons9053 it would be a little tricky, but not necessarily impossible. Considering all of the lands are quite a bit in altitude, any contemporary human living on that world would have to deal with altitude sickness and or adapt. Not to mention because of radically different evolutionary paths, there would be no recognizable animal or plants to eat, so any settlers to this version of Earth would need to figure out what they could and couldn't eat. And considering most of the globe is covered in water, storms should be a doozy, but people have been dealing with bad weather since the dawn of humanity I'm sure someone living there could adapt. Since all the land is pretty much the tops of mountains, cave systems might be an option. Those don't blow down in a stiff breeze.
Good thought experiment. The only issue, and I imagine you're painfully aware of it, is that if the world had had that much water, water erosion would have been much higher and not even Tibet would have resisted it. The mountains that "survive" in your video would have either not formed or been eroded away already.
This is really helpful for my idea of a smaller water world with a small "archipelago cotenant" chain where amphibious flight comes before landmasses poke out of the oceans long enough to allow walking creatures. Also this video terrifies me a lot.
Green lands hidden Mountains will also be a massive continent So i would like to see a part 2 of some sorts over this sea level visualization is the best!
Two ideas in a similar vein for future videos: 1) Imagining if one or more of our modern continents were missing: no Africa, or no North America, or no Eurasia 2) Imagining if the axis of rotation of Earth was shifted 90 degrees, e.g. one end of the axis in the Pacific, the other end in Africa
Had earth always had as much water as demonstrated in this video I find it highly unlikely that any land fauna and flora would develop much past the early carboniferous period, as land would be too fleeting. Everything that did evolve would have to be capable of propagating over distances of water. Land animals would be semi-aquatic or very small, and the plant life would depend on wind and water for seed dispersal. Mammals could not possibly have evolved, and I doubt that, if flight ever did evolve, that it would develop sufficiently to survive the next inundation.
Seeing the Earth with far lower sea levels would be interesting, as would speculating on what the Earth might look like with drastically different continental drift speed (if that even makes any difference) or erosion rates. Loved the video.
If sea levels had always been that high it would be interesting to see what is able to evolve quickly on land given the very temporary nature of land masses on an evolutionary and geological time scale. Perhaps we would see a lot more amphibians dominate the terrestrial landscapes.
On such time scales wouldn't it still make more sense to adapt fully to dominating the dry terrain that would exist largely the same for hundreds to thousands of generations at the very least? Amphibians wouldn't necessarily dominate coastal areas as it hasn't been dominated by amphibians by mass given more mass exists fully adapted to ocean/seas and land separately and not much that is amphibious other than swamp land.
Ok so I'm no biology expert but I am fauna enthusiast and my knowledge mostly comprised from watching yt videos😅 so I'm open open to all suggestions... Firstly I want to mention is that whales might thrive in this ecosystem might get even larger 2) The largest big cat might be the snow leopard from the Himalayas 3) Seals , sea lions , sea otters will also be able to cpoe up with this ecosystem mostly living around those archipelago 4 ) For birds the aquatic speciation increase
Hello, first off I would like to say that you have done an amazing job! I really enjoyed watching the content and found that it was very informative and well made. At 20:15 - 20:35 mins you asked for input about what water levels people would like you to show and talk about. In this regard, I have several suggestions for you to consider. 1. At 17:40 - 17:48 mins of the video, there is a beautiful clip of the continents separating from one land mass into their current positions. I would like to see this same illustration, but with different water levels. One at todays water levels, one with +500m of water, one with +1000m of water, one with +1500m of water, and one with +2000m of water.
I think a planet like this would have a hard time to evolve fully terrestial life. With continents that only get to ~100 million years of age before being submerged again, I would assume that amphibians, fish and arthropods would reign supreme.
Where I used to live on the west side of Nairobi was almost exactly 2000m in elevation, so it would have become beach-front property. Somehow I was expecting the Kenyan highlands to be more extensive on your new earth than they were.
The authors and DMs are plotting. I like this what-if scenario. Thank you for giving me ideas to work on at work! I like to think that this water-world does exist, in another universe, and another AtlasPro has made a video saying, “What if the world had a lot LESS water? Let’s lower the sea levels by 2,000 meters. And freeze some. Wow. Look at all that land!”
Imagine how would human civilization would work in this Earth. The great empire of Tibet, the pirates of the rookies. So much potential for world building right here.
let's say humans evolved to reach behavioral modernity in tibet. there would be a LOT going on in tibet. empires, migrations, wars, etc, but it would take very very long until humans ventured beyond the islands they could see over the horizon, like the zagros. crossing the atlantic or pacific would have to wait until a much later stage of technical developement or would require a much larger incentive than what enabled colonialism originating from europe.
The eurasian parte of the world would host a modernization of their people, while the américas would be land of maorí like types of civilizations, that would conquer the andeans, México and the rookies depending on the latitude
Could you please make a video about ancient Martian bodies of water? Or maybe paleoareology in general? I find it fascinating that Mars had very real seas and glaciers in the past, but it's so hard to find estimates of what areas they were in exactly and how expansive they were. It's so cool to think about how the red planet changed and how it was very much like the dying world early sci-fi writers imagined, in the real past.
The reason for the Rockies being more chaotic than Tibet or the Andes has very little to do with their age or erosion. It is because of different orogenic events that created the mountains in a connected, but haphazard way, most specifically the Laramide Orogeny in the east and south (Colorado, New Mexico, Mexico) and the Sevier Orogeny in the west and north (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Canada). The two orogenies can be traced through northern Utah where they meet. The Rockies are also unique because of the shallower angle of the subduction of the Farallon Plate under the North America Plate, causing the mountains to rise almost a 1000 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and spreading the mountain building over a broader area, and lower overall elevation, than a similar subduction in South America of the Nazca Plate being subducted.
Whst I find interesting is how much different North America would look if the mountains raised by those ancient orogenies could only be eroded down to approach sea level, how much more massive would the forms taken by later orogenies be? Surely there would be vastly more land above the higher seas than we get by simplistically increasing sea levels after millions or in some cases billions of yeas of erosion above sea level have already proceeded.
Answer to the ararat question, idk if you'll ever see this: 1) it's not certain that it was what is called ararat in modern day, and it says mountains of ararat, which is much broader. 2) the flood wasn't caused by an infusion of new water, but would've logically been produced by rising less-dense fresh oceanic crust caused by runaway subduction. The rising crust would've pushed the water of the oceans over the continents, and then as it subsided as it cooled, the oceans would've receded. In addition the continents would've been uplifted at the end of the flood, and the highest peaks were only formed late, otherwise they would've had time to be eroded. This is called the catastrophic plate tectonics model
Super interesting! I think we want a 2000 meter lower sea level example too! And both 1000 meters higher and lower sea levels would be super interesting as well!
since this is nice "what-if" series... if we remove all the water on the earth, can we walk freely in Mariana Trench? I guess we would need a series of "adaptations" like when climbing Mt. Everest (?)
Something no one ever talks about in relation to a warming earth is what will likely be an enormous amount of rebound. I think this will evolve some extensive volcanism. Might even change the continents themselves.
I think it’s a bit unlikely. Volcanos are caused by subduction and hot spots. Other tectonic activity either does nothing or prevents them. Like the rebound still happening in Northern Europe.
Isostatic rebound is being experienced in a number of Northern countries that had massive amounts of overlying ice during the last ice age. The only other parts of a warming Earth that would experience it, would be Greenland and Antarctica, to varying degrees. Only parts of Antarctica are volcanic.
...Not correct... Sorry. Climate change is measured in 10ths of degrees. Two or three degrees of change may no sound like much, but if climate-change-theory is true, it can have massive ecological ripples throughout life. It does _not_ affect landmasses. In order to see any rebound from thermal expansion, we would need to see dozens of degrees of temperature change, something that we couldn't do if we tried for a million years straight.
Do you think Mt. Erebus and the remaining Antarctic mountains would still retain their polar climate, even with all the moderating effects of the water surrounding and isolating them?
I'd say that the Antarctic circumpolar current would likely still prevent much heat from migrating in from warmer waters. The question of polar ice sheets didn't come up in this video, but I'd imagine that they'd have a significant impact on the climate and biogeography in a world with so little land.
@@Deadlyish The Antarctic Circumpolar Current wouldn't exist without the massive circular landmass directly covering the pole. Such a world wouldn't have an ice cover at all, especially given that water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas. We're only in a temporary glacial period now because of the unusual land configuration (Antarctica blocks water from reaching the south pole, while Eurasia and North America are mostly blocking currents from reaching the north pole). Throughout most of Earth's history, there was tropical vegetation at the poles.
I think it would be the reverse: without the poleward deflection of low-latitude water and the presence of hot-summer continental regions, polar climates would probably extend to 45 degrees or so (with the possible exception of southern Andea). I realized this when imagining a world without the largest continental mainlands (for example, most of the British Isles having a tundra biome).
I from Dominican Republic, we have the highest mountains in the Caribbean being the "Pico Duarte" the most highest with 3,175m (9,610ft) located in the "Cordillera Central". Taking into account this scenario, it would be the only place in the Caribbean that would remain in surface added to other small surrounding archipelagos in the mountain range, in what was once the island "Hispaniola".
Great video as always as seen with the intro Btw, if you have time, can you perhaps do a geography or cover of planet mercury's terrain in the future? I havent seen a lot of people doing that and I thought it would be a good topic to cover
Well, Mercury is a dead planet, meaning that it doesn't have tectonic plates or volcanic activity. It's surface is like our moon's surface: Full of craters, no life and no atmosphere It's just a boring rock that could be used to mining due to it's amounts of iron, copper and steel
Andes also had steep angle subduction as opposed to a more shallow angle. This is why the rockies cover the entire western USA and central america while the andes are a thin band along western south america. The rockies had very shallow subduction angles.
I love the first minute of the video he’s talking about how riding the sea levels 70 meters doesn’t do all that much, while casually showing that all of Florida is underwater.
I’d really like to know what effects the shallow seas formed by the former continents would have on marine ecosystems. Or could with tweaking the water level.
I feel in terms of biology, some kind of flying animal group would dominate, as birds dominate isolated Pacific islands as nesting grounds today. Some kind of flying group, whether reptiles, mammals, birds or even fish (as in the Future is Wild) would be able to potentially traverse the distances between some of these island groups and nest there, creating unique island biogeography like with dodos in our world. Great video, and really fun to think about.
The Sierra Madre Occidental and the other Sierra Madre's ranges are the few places in Mexico where the climate is somewhat temperate and has the correct conditions for high-altitude forests to appear. These would be a collection of regions where the most varieties of pine and oak trees would be located; alongside animals such as cougars, deers, armadillos, opossums, racoons, golden eagles, hummingbirds and rattlesnakes. Overall, without considering much of the geological and climatological events that would lead to this region to become its own archipielago, I suppose it would remain a template (maybe a bit more 'mediterranean' considering the increase in warm oceanic currents) zone with warm summers and moderately cold winters, both with humid conditions; small trees, epiphytes and some vines which dweel in the mountains alongside medium to big sized nocturnal and or crepuscular animals. And if I had the chance to choose one random but nonsensical elemento to preserve in this region, is that part of the Sierra Madre Occidental is the habitat where the monarch butterfly spends winters. So I'd love to see this part of the world be its last bastion and a new home where really beautiful and impressive speciation proccesses for this butterfly to occur for generations.
They may spend their winters there but their birth and growing are spent in areas that would be underwater in that senario, so they wouldn't last long.
That much additional water adds an insane amount of weight. I can see much more violent eruptions and seismic events. These in turn could make life turf side much more difficult.
Great video! Raises lots of questions about the possibilities of life in this waterworld. With so much less fauna (even if there was an abundant plant life on what land remains), how would that affect O2 and CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and thus the oxygen breathing animals on Earth?
Would those valleys carved out by the Salween, Mekong, and Yangtze rivers be considered fjords in this flooded hypothetical, or would they be considered rias? Perhaps discussing the difference could be an interesting video topic for AtlasPro
I think what makes a Ria a ria is they are much shallower and don't have the steep mountain sides like Fjords, but in practice both are flooded river valleys.
I've never heard of a 'ria' but these here would be called 'sounds', i.e. flooded river carved valleys as opposed to 'fjords' - valleys of glacial origin
@@Radnugget Case in point: the area we locally call the Sound is actually part of a series of fjords. According to Wikipedia, the drainage basin near some of the coastal towns is a Ria. Puget Sound and Gray's Harbor for anyone wondering.
Hi! If it's not too complicated to explain, what did you use to make the sea rise visualisations? For a couple years now I've had the idea floating around the back of my mind of trying to world-build an earth with raised sea levels, but rarely found conclusive/detailed/expansive maps to get an idea of the lax of the land (for example for 60m higher sea levels) ^^'
@@terraspace1100 Why is one amount too big, and what makes the other amount "just right"? Also, isn't a factor of 300/50= 6 _still_ completely crazy? 🤔 Especially considering that the average ocean depth is 'just' 3.7 km... Even for the 'low' number of 50 km, you'd _still_ be adding 13.5 times the depth!!😲 Your reply did make me look this up; Earth's radius is 'only' 6,371 km. So adding 5000 km of ocean would basically double the radius. The circumference would then be 71,446 km instead of 40,075 km. The area would be 400 million km2 instead of 127.8. The volume increase would be _massive,_ ending up at 6,158,636,731,595 km3, compared to now 1,083,206,916,846. So you'd have to _add_ *five whole Earths* worth of comets 😮 I have _no idea_ what that would do to Earth's gravity, and will leave that math up to you 😂 (but, since water is less dense than rock, I'd expect it wouldn't change _that_ much, right?)
This is a great concept for a series of videos. I’d watch one on 1000m, 500m, or even if you reduced sea level. A -1000m would be incredibly interesting. Great video
Out of curiosity, how big of an icy meteor would we need to collide with our cute little Earth to cause such sea level rises? How much bigger than the first water delivering meteor would it need to be, and would the collision of such an iceball with our planet be an extinction level event, or just be a case of let's see what survives the giant tidal waves, assuming impact site is somewhere in the pacific or on the poles?
Without any scientific data at hand, i would say it could be a moon sized object, which did not do an impact, but would be slowly absorbed by the earth.
It would really have to be an enormous series of meteors. These would have to be relatively small as their speed alone would cause a heck of a problems before reaching this much water.
The first? There were countless numbers of icy bodies adding to the already present water content. Besides, the surface area of all our oceans, multiplied by 2 km depth, arriving as a large mass; accounting for it's larger volume from being expanded ice? Those tsunamis would be whole continents being liquefied by raging kinetic energy, as the whole planet gasps in one big "OH FUCK".
Considering he's essentially adding s bubble of water that surrounds the entire earth while being some 1900 meters thick on average, this comet would have to be motherfucking huge to add all this water. With its collision, it would probably blow a huge amount off the planet, and thus make up for that. So probably around 1.5 x the size of mercury, with mostly ice/water making it up. Like 90%, I think. Edit: I way underestimated how big mercury is, this is probably more like a 2 volumes of Pluto rather than 1.5x mercury in mass.
This reminds me of Evacuate: Earth doc about the world covered by water due to an ice comet crashing the moon, resulting a ring of ice falling to the gravity well of Earth.
I find myself wondering the same thing. I think the atmosphere would be pushed up because the gas is less dense than liquid but what then? Consider this, if the volume of the atmosphere stayed the same then the sea level rise would cause the atmosphere to become thinner. This would mean the column of air overhead would be shorter than present which would mean lower atmospheric pressure. But would that really be the case? The surface of the Earth would be 2000m closer to the Sun and the ocean tends to reflect less light than the land perhaps resulting in more heat absorbtion than present. That could cause more evaporation and water vapor so therefore a thicker atmosphere with a higher pressure. Then again that would cause more clouds to form. Clouds would reflect a lot of light.
Air pressure will barely be affected as the atmosphere is simply 'pushed up'; Earth radius is over 3000x the sea level radius so no real effect on the volume. Herb Stalkens is absolutely right though, the increased surface area covered by ocean will cause a large drop in albedo ie. cause Earth to become much less reflective, absorbing more solar energy and becoming significantly hotter and more humid. The tropical storms I imagine will be very, very intense on this planet.
![Seungmin "그렇게, 천천히, 우리(As we are)" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/kAzmhLHePqU/mqdefault.jpg)
This is the most convoluted way to give Bolivia a coastline
maybe they could finally use their navy lol
😄!!
Plot Twist: Bolivia is the one helping the fossil fuel industry so in the future they will have a coastline.
This would make a great map for a game world.
Especially with the whole "It was Earth all along" twist baked in.
not just game, but also novel, my idea is that some scientist try to create a portal to take water from water rich moon (such as ganymede) to solve world thirst, but inadvertently take too much water and flood earth instead
@@skyfeelan I had an idea about that when I was younger, but it was aliens draining their planet's unnecessary oceans to earth to destroy us.
I was thinking this too! It would make a great futuristic world map for a game, after some kind of disastrous mistake caused Earth to have WAY more water in the oceans than it should have!
also think of the kinds of oceanic creatures that would evolve on a planet like this, where most of the surface was covered by deep ocean with very few land masses... Gets the imagination going!
@@skyfeelan is this a Sci-Fi comedy? 🤣🤣
if sea levels were that high for millions of years, the landscape would of course look different because erosion and sedimentation cause landmass to "accumulate" at or around the altitude of sea level (in addition to different climate patterns causing different rates of erosion). areas much higher get eroded, and their sediments are deposited in deltas, increasing the amount of land that is near sea level. if you look at a graph that shows the total area of land on earth at a particular altitude, you will spot a distinct spike around sea level because that's where sea level has been ±100m for hundreds of millions of years. check out the same graph for mars and see if you can spot a spike that might represent what sea level could have been over there back when mars still had water
Wikipedia says that sea level has oscillated every ~100k years from (roughly) -50 to +250 meters over the last 500 million years :)
Your comment did make me think about how those deltas with/of eroded materials would be affected by ice ages.
It would mean that there are a lot more deltas under water, right? So that's a lot of comparatively shallow sea, which boosts marine life (/biomass).
And then, as sea level rises, we'd also expect the places that are 50 to 100 to 150 meters above sea level to look like deltas, too...
Google says that, for the last 2.6 million years, there usually was an ice age of 90k years and then a warm period of 10k years, so the currently-underwater deltas should be quite dominant!
However, I have _no idea_ whether erosion would just wipe it all out, over such time scales....
Anyhow, thanks for sending me down that rabbit hole 😂👍🏼
Yeah, the difference would be that the earth would be a little bit less dense and maybe there would be the same amount of continents but it would look totally different
And there would be a lot of volcanism
Had the same feeling. All those small islands would have no chance (or would merge?)
@@MrNicoJac Ice ages would probably affect sea levels a lot less in that world though, since there's _way_ less land -- especially in polar and subpolar regions -- for ice sheets to collect on. Sea ice doesn't affect sea level much at all, since it displaces as much water as it melts to become.
Is this the reason why russia(siberia) is so large today
I'll be honest, I never really paid much attention to the rivers in Asia, but after watching this video I found it fascinating that major tributaries of the Brahmaputra River (1806 miles long, then flows into the Ganges-Padma River (1569 miles long)), the Irrawaddy River (1422 miles long), the Salween River (2044 miles long), the Mekong River (3051 miles long), and the Yangtze River (3900 miles long) all start or pass within a strip of land 130 miles wide. The two furthest discharges are about 1950 miles apart as the raven flies, or around 5200 miles (4524 nautical miles) by sea.
Isn't this the climax of mission impossible fallout where they want to detonate a nuke there?
Living in Mexico in the central valleys, as soon as I started watching your interesting video, I began to realize that in this dystopian future, Mexico would be the country that would conserve the largest percentage of its territory in the world. Assuming that the event happened in a short time, Mexico would also keep its main cities since several of them are located above 2,000 meters, so I think that this would be the only way we would become a world power :)
Nepal, Butan, and probably Chile, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Ecuador, Bolivia, Turkey and Iran (altough I think Mexico is the largest):
@@SebastianBaos and China,Pakistan new Zealand,Papua New Guinea,Andorra, Ethiopia etc too
@@deadhandof9108doesn’t most of china live on the coast? tibet has a population of 4 million, the mountains in mexico have over half the population
what about usa and Colorado Wyoming western Montana utah idaho and Alaska and maybe Hawaii
@@parkerwebb3470 It seems to me that in terms of percentage, they do not have most of their territory above 2,000 meters above sea level.
Going to get in early rather than watch the video before commenting, because I absolutely love the concept and I want to see a follow-up video: What if the sea level was a lot LOWER? Not the 100-200m of an ice age, but 500 or 1000 meters, or maybe even more.
Yes! Would love to see it as well.
Yes! Great idea, I mentioned this to my dad(this video) and then he was talking about if the water was lower how the oceans has tons of mountains and basins. Very fascinating. Love your channel!!!!
Actually this is the hypothetical nonsense you get on Unveiled and What If. I expect more relevance on this channel.
That would be awesome!
Fascinating
when you're so into islands that you have to imagine different ways exotic islands could exist.
islands are the best istg
Hahaha. I’m loving the videos though. 😂
@@TheOnlyCaprisun nice profile 😂
@@louisinese thanks! i made it myself.
There's a Stephen Baxter novel called Flood that is pretty fascinating. Follows a group of people as the seas rise like this, mostly because of water trapped beneath/in the crust finally breaking free and being forced up into the ocean by the weight of the plates, I think.
"Flood" doesn't actually explain where the water came from, but leaves it open for the sequel. Which also doesn't explain.
On the plus side, Baxter does argue the case that with extremely elevated sea levels the climate would be much warmer, which is relevant to this video.
@@pembrokeshiredan I remember watching an Anton video, where he said that over the course of 4.5B years, the Sun has stripped away about an ocean's worth of water from the surface of the Earth through breakdown of the H2O molecules (which is still happening today), and the hydrogen escaping Earth's gravity. Perhaps that's where the water came from if this never happened? Although the oxygen levels might be different if all of that broken-down water didn't leave its oxygen behind.
@@illegal_space_alien Earth actually have more water inside the mantel. The ringwoodite trapped about 2/3 of total water in Earth. This facts actually suggest why Earth have plat tectonic movement, it being assists by the water among the mineral in the mantel.
Theoretically, if Earth have a massive earthquake affected the whole world, the mantel would be less dense and volcanic eruption would happen in global scale. This will also depressurize the ringwoodite and release the water inside the mineral, and Earth will have 3x more water than in the ocean right now.
@@illegal_space_alien Hey, another Anton Petrov watcher! :) Good to see my peeps here. (Not THAT surprising--if you like one sciencey educational channel you might like others.) Anyway, two things I've learned from this: 1) I'd apparently be fine (in terms of drowning/not drowning, anyway) right where I am, if this suddenly just up and happened, and 2) I have a new sci-fi book to read. :)
@@illegal_space_alien We also get water from space. Comets are just dirty snowballs, so if they come down, we get more water. Also hydrogen inside the Earth combines with oxygen to get more H²O.
4 mountains in the Appalachian Mountains (Eastern US Mountains) poke right above the water line as little isolated islands in a giant sea.
and they would be by far the oldest landmasses on the planet
@@dane1382 That would be the Island of Roraima, and by a lot
Except it would be a whole small continent if sea levels were always 2000m higher not just a few peaks. The world would have vastly more land than in this video because erosion doesn't really cut away land to much below sea level, and runoff deposits sediment along coasts, plus erosion gets less intense with shallower slopes. So yeah, there'd be a whole content in Appalachia. There might even still be land masses from 1-2+ billion old mountains that might once have existed across the plains so the continent could have been even larger and possibly connected to the rest of North America.
And many other mountain ranges too, they are just too small to be called continents
@@j.f.fisher5318😊
This would be a bird-dominated world 100%
whitout food?
Yaks and birds lol
A world where Emus commiserate around the family hearth about the horrors of the Great Human War.
Fish
Maybe some pygmy moose aswell, they can swim for lomger than our mental health is prepared for, dive deeper on a breathhold than some divers on trimex and have a very "heads on" approach towards threats.....literally.
Oceanographer here, this was a great video! I especially like how it leads to open ended questions for thinkers of all disciplines. In my case, I would like to point out that the lack of substantial continental boundaries would lead to more energetic, circumplanetary annular currents at many latitudes. Currently, we only have this in the Southern Ocean in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The shallow seas in North America and the Andes would likely still allow for western boundary currents, but there would doubtless be a lot of interesting interaction between water masses on either side of the archipelago, much like we see today between the Pacific and Indian oceans being connected through Indonesia.
Needless to say, all terrestrial climate would be some variety of oceanic, save for maybe the most sheltered of Tibetan uplands, while monsoons wouldn't exist due to a lack of large landmasses, which are involved in that climate process.
There's also the question of sea ice dynamics in the absence of continents, as well as the effect of a water world albedo on climate regulation compared to today's 30% land paradigm. This whole thought exercise would be an interesting problem to tackle with a coupled general circulation model.
By the way, if you ever do a follow-up on this from an oceanographic standpoint, or do a completely different ocean-heavy video, I'd be happy to provide help! (proofing, feedback, etc.)
Man I’d love to see renders of a coupled GCM running this…
@@TAP7a Same! The problem is, such a necessarily global model would require a lot of computer time to run, and considering this is of basically no value to the kind of oceanography funding agencies care about, it would be hard to get it up and running as a proper study. On the other hand, exoplanet research might benefit from it, seeing as Earth already has real bathymetry, which means we wouldn't have to guess it or approximate it away in order to model a semi water world planet. At the very least it could be a good undergraduate senior thesis
When the ice caps melt (less weight), does the floating crustal land mass rise?
@@john9982 I do not think so. In this scenarion there is still extra 2000 meter tall water column pushing on them. And ice is less dense e.g. lighter than ice, so pressure on the landmass would be even higher IMHO.
I feel like this setting with tibet would be very interesting for how a civilization would start on it and grow. If there was a landmass like this surrounded by water. They’d have some flat lands good for building, lots of lakes and ponds, and they’d be sheltered by mountains all around. And then there’s those mountain range like islands north of them which could be later explored. Would be cool to have as a map in one of those games like that where you make a civilization
Exactly what I was thinking. The game Worldbox is good for this type of stuff so I may see if someone can make the Tibet Plateau for it.
Also I think Erosion would probably make some of the land in Tibet flat, idk if that’s completely wrong tho lol
@Mal_31 nah your right if the water rose then rain would rose too since many storms that happen is under that 2000m so rain would land on top where it was normally frozen eroding a little faster and flatten out the bases for more plains like area
I dropped a more comple response to this elsewhere but for example those 3 fjords wouldn't exist in a world that had 2000m higher sea level because that's the level where deposited sediment would overtake erosion and those would be river valleys near sea level instead of deep fjords. Just one tiny problem among countless issues this simplitic view of geology produces.
Tropico 5 fever dream
I'd like to see the effects of sea level if we swapped the altitude of the tallest mountain with the depth of the bottom of the ocean - ie. if the sea level dropped so that Challenger deep, currently at -10,971m, was now only -8,848m - this is just a bit more than 2000m of sea level drop, so would be a pretty good companion to this video.
I'd also like to speculate on the ecology of my home country, NZ, in the scenario of +2000m: it wouldn't change much. It'd still be an isolated group of islands dominated by birds who could fly/swim here then diversify into various niches that are filled by mammals elsewhere. There'd be significantly less land, and there would be little variety in climate among the land that remains, so there would be less biodiversity overall.
0:56 "This dosen't alter that planet that much"
Bangladesh: Confused 170 million people screaming
Move
not to be pedantic, but the Rocky Mountains in North America are above 2000 meters - the lowest point is 7630 feet or 2325 meters. I live in the foothills of the Rockies and the idea of moving a few miles west, and having great beach front property to boot, is very appealing.
I don’t understand the basis for his video. Lots of area is higher than 6500 ft above sea level. Seems like an odd thing to get wrong right off the bat and it turns me off from this video and the rest of his content.
@@sleep_sounds Some areas are well above 2000m in the Rockies, but not enough to form a unified continent-sized landmass.
We’re getting into territory that’s really hard to predict, but with so much extra water, wouldn’t the different distribution of weight on the tectonic plates cause them to move differently anyways? Tibet, the Andes, the Rockies and so on might not even form if all the extra water was here from the beginning. So this makes a fun exercise if the earth suddenly got an extra 2km depth of water, but god knows what the landmasses would develop like if we started with the extra water.
The clear answer would, mammals & humans wouldn't be here today, exercising these theories
I wonder, would the poles still have ice-masses?
like giant permafrost adrift in the global ocean, that'd be pretty cool
Also planets bulge at their equator due to rotational forces, and adding any extra mass on top of that would itself be subject to that same bulge, so adding a uniform 2 km of water across the surface of the earth would redistribute itself to be less than that at the poles and more than that at the equator. It would never be as simple as just adding 2,000m to sea level worldwide, even disregarding differences due to long-term factors like erosion and effects of pressure from different weight distributions.
I calculated 859,074,600,000,000 tons of additional weight due to all that water. Seems like it would make a huge difference and sink all the current continental plates and eventually they would become oceanic plates as well. Only places like Hawaii built on oceanic plates would survive I think.
We'd be an intelligent fish species like in aquaman
I am a professional geologist and I want you to know that I love this so so so much. This seriously made my day and I will be subjecting everyone I know that would be even remotely interested to it.
It's fun until you start thinking about how erosion would have proceeded differently if sea levels were 2000m higher, how volcanic islands would have built higher as well. And how less effective erosion of ancient mountains would have allowerd future orogenies to uplift much greater areas about these higher seas.
Tectonic processes would be significantly altered by this much water, just the weight of it alone would alter how the rocks of the crust move, fold etc. At some point too much water might even shutdown plate tectonics as we know it. Ultimatly land and water are intimatly connected an one can't be altered without effecting the other.
The average density of the lithosphere (which makes up the most of the plate-material) is around 3g./cm³ and is, in the large majority of areas, significantly more than 2km. thick, so the weight of the water you're adding on top of them is a fraction of their own weight. The calculation shows that a block of the lithosphere that is one kilometer by one kilometer and two kilometers thick will weigh approximately 6 billion metric tons; 2000 meters of water on top of that is a third the weight. Given that the density of the material underlying the lithosphere is *greater* ... and that the lithosphere may well be thicker than 2 kilometers (& thus weigh even more) - how much subsidence can you expect?
People who aren't used to it, have problems conceptualizing measurements where 500,000,000 tons isn't really all *that* big a number, but when doing astronomical calculations (masses of large asteroids and the like) ... meh ...
@@ephennell4ever very funny words, magic man =D
@@ephennell4ever There was major tectonic shifting at the end of the last Ice Age with the meltwater pulses raising sea levels to around their current position. Northern North America lost it's ice sheet and due to the relief of all that weight, raised up a few thousand feet. The African continent has risen 1500 feet since then. So you saying this much water would not affect plate tectonics is inaccurate. One thing you seem to be forgetting is, while the Lithosphere is dense and the magma underneath it is denser (as you would expect moving toward the center of mass), magma is a fluid and therefore more compressible, allowing it to be forced to move by increased mass above it.
@@ephennell4ever I've never seen someone try and sound this smart when saying something that even common sense tells you is wrong
@@ephennell4ever You just proved yourself wrong while still being right lol. You’re completely correct but you forgot that the water gets compressed and weighs more at lower depths, to be honest both the water and plates will end up weighing similar amounts due to the same process of pressure
Atlas pro:"If sea levels were to rise for about 70 meters it wouldn't alter the layout of the planet all that much".
Me being dutch:"Bro, my entire country just disappeared".
Tibet and the Andes are great but I feel like there could've been more stress on the archipelagos that remained(like the Cordillera archipelago you talked about). It would be a great showing of what island specific phenomena are out there as there would be islands in the most diverse of places. Also I feel like 1000m while not as extreme would also be very interesting. Great vid!
I love this speculative biogeography!
Honestly, if you do go further down this path, you might even want to make a colab with the "Curious Archive", YT channel dedicated to studying the speculative biology of games as well as art projects and books.
Could be very interesting seeing you two together
The quality of these videos is just magnificent. I really don't know why more people don't watch you. You explain concepts like this so clearly and in such a fun way, i don't feel bored in trying to remember all the points, i just have fun and i learn. Its hard to do that and you have done it. Very underrated
@@cruz7579 what if its not cringe? what if its just that people dont care to enjoy what he does and only care about the fact that sure he talks in a kinda cringy american accent. the internet is full of shit, so people who look at shit would be convinced that everything here is shit, but this guy isn't.
i have no idea if that made sense
As a Mexican I would love a video about the geography, geology, biology and ecology of Mexico, as one of (if not the most) diverse country in the continent with every climate except for the polar one
He's talked about our country in his 7 realms of biogeography video; an honorific mention as a great transitional zone between the Neoartic and the Neotropical realms. If you take a road trip from the Mexican highlands through either one of the Sierra Madre mountain ranges, and head to the coast, you'll witness an outstanding change in flora and weather that really makes oneself feel like traveling a colossal distance when you're actually just traversing a couple hundred kilometers as the crow flies.
Too many people have no idea what Mexico is like. I sing its praises to all that listen. Too many are shocked to find it's in North America. I can't think of a South or Central American country that I haven't at one time or another had to tell someone wasn't a place in Mexico, so it's not surprising though you'd think that would mean people wouldn't think its one big desert.
@@AJNpa80 just like fox news when they called latin American countries Mexican countries 🥲
Toluca is almost one of those cities of eternal spring, just far enough from the equator to have a winter and should never feel like a steam bath (like Florida) due to the elevation
i would like to see this also
This is a fantastic video! I absolutely loved this and I can't wait for more! How about what would Earth look like with a 2000m sea level drop?
Oh You see essentially Atlantis And Can walk from North America to Japan through Europe
America and Russia would have a land border, Saudi Arabia and and Iran would have a land border, God the chaos that could happen here.
Chile: I am the longest thing in south america
Andes: Hold my LENGTH
There was a documentary made about this topic over 25 years ago. It´s called Waterworld.
huh
😆
Narrated by Kevin Costner!
It reminds me of a web project I saw a while ago that investigated different environments called the Planetocopia. It had several categories including several modifications to earth: one particularly significant one being changing the location of the poles, including:
Seapole: Both poles are located in the ocean.
Shiveria: Both Poles are located on land.
Turnovia: Poles are reversed, inverting ocean currents.
Jaredia: Relocating the poles to create a more habitable and societally unified Earth.
Underwater geography would be cool. Like what’s up with the massive amount of sunken islands, seamounts, and underwater volcanoes there are. I think we get so caught up with what’s happening on land that we forget that most of earths geography is underwater
I am deliberately distracting myself from the fact that I am having a physics exam tomorrow morning by watching this video.
I think it could be an interesting experiment to take the height map of the Earth and invert it, so the highest points become the deepest. Then flood it with either the same amount of water Earth currently has, or with just enough to have the current percentage of dry land.
Very cool idea
You would find hundreds of islands where present day Taiwan is, as there are at least 269 peaks over 3000 meters, and another 38 over 2900 meters tall. Some of these islands will be connected, since the ridges are also likely over 2000 meters tall. It's the result of the Philippine Sea Plate ramming into the Yangtze Plate.
also greenland, he forgot to mention mongolia and antarctica / portions of siberia too
I find it really interesting to imagine humanity trying to survive an apocalyptic event such as this, with some major cities like La Paz, Bolivia being able to remain unscathed, while most others are hundreds of meters below sea level.
Read Flood by Stephen Baxter. It’s totally about that.
Well, many people could migrate into cities, towns that are unscathed
You should read the book series "plague year" same concept, but let's just say the world isn't flooded with *water*
"Island biogeography part 1-3"
"Earth's lost islands"
"Island's that aren't islands"
Now the man is making more islands... he must be stopped
POV: you're scouting Real Estate for what wouldn't be blasted by tidal waves during a meteor strike
'In Plain Sight' seems like a great name for a series where you work through places in the world that we don't realize are x, y, z and how changing just one thing about the earth (in this case sea levels) showcases what they truly are.
An interesting thought would be how Antartica would (slowly) rise when the weight of the thick layer of ice would have disappeared. The same process which is still happening in Scandinavia.
This is a place where new land could possibly form and animals which arrive here could become giants. While everywhere else the fauna would most likely shrink down in size.
That's true, if the ice melted, the pressure would push the actual rocky continent upwards.
Apparently I have the memory of a goldfish; I just remembered that glaciers push continents downward & affect the elevation of the land beneath them, that was literally the case with Scandinavia, ignore what I originally commented
The same would happen to greenland
Thank you for saying "If all the ice in Antarctica melted" not "The arctic". I took oceanography and I'm very, very tired of the disinformation being pumped out pretending that if the north pole melted, sea levels would change in volume.
For those wondering, the south pole is ice sitting on a continent, while the north pole is just floating ice.
Free-floating ice doesn't increase volume of the body it sits in when it melts. The reason it was floating in the first place was because it was displacing it's own mass already.
He made a short about that exact thing like a few dats ago.
Loved this video, always a treat.
You mentioned deserts, but I don't expect any world with this little land would actually have any. Anything out of the tropics would likely have a "New Zealand-like" climate.
It really depends on how you define a desert. The Ka'ū Desert in Hawaii is on the leeward side of the island and experiences a rainshadow, though most of the lack of vegetation comes from volcanic-based acid rain.
The Andean continent would certainly experience a rainshadow as well, as it does currently. And they would also likely have polar deserts down in the remnants of Antarctica if the temperatures remained anywhere near the current ones ( though this is unlikely). There may not be any true deserts, but there would certainly be areas of much lower precipitation.
@@BonaparteBardithion would arid climate be possible with that narrow of piece of landmass tho? I gather that with the proximity from the sea the air current would always reach the most inward land area carrying rain.
@@amirulhakim9898
Semi-arid could certainly be possible just taking wind direction into account. But that's assuming that weather patterns in any way still resemble our current ones with that much moisture in the air.
The Cape Verde Islands (Cabo Verde) in the Atlantic have an arid climate today. There is a rain shadow effect on the higher islands (all of volcanic origin) creating micro climates, but the main problem is that the sea air at that latitude doesn't reliably carry much moisture. The islands are at the same latitude as the southern edge of the Sahara desert. In most years the winds don't carry enough moisture for the uplift over the islands to cause much precipitation. Indeed, in some years there is severe drought, which has causing periodic famines in the islands' roughly 550 year recorded inhabited history.
The dry air isn't primarily caused by the presence of the nearby Sahara desert, which would disappear in this water Earth scenario (the tops of the highest Cabo Verde mountain peaks would remain). Rather it is the Hadley Cell nature of atmospheric circulation of the entire planet which causes both the Sahara desert and the fluctuating, irregular but generally very arid Cabo Verde climate.
Some similar type of circulation would inevitably also exist on water Earth. Basically the sun heats the ocean more at the equator than at the poles, so the atmosphere is set in motion by this. Hot wet air therefore rises from the sea surface at the equator and moves north and south. But it starts cooling, and water precipitates out, forming the generally wet regions around the equator. By about 20 degrees north and south the air is dry again and falling, creating dryer high pressure conditions on most of the planet in the 20 to 40 latitude band on today's world. Most of the present world's deserts lie within this band.
Cabo Verde lies just to the south, the islands scattered around latitude 16 degrees north of the equator, where the boundary between the rising wet and falling dry air cells lie. Most of the time it is on the dry side, but it sometimes gets bursts of sudden downpours which is why anything grows there at all.
This boundary zone extends around the planet at the same latitudes north and south of the equator. It moves around a bit and brings unpredictable weather.
In the water Earth scenario there still would presumably be Hadley circulation cells and such boundaries between them. But the absence of most of today's continents might produce a more regular pattern with smoother transitions. So perhaps the bits of Cabo Verde's mountain peaks poking out of the water, perhaps from just today's Fogo island, would experience a more regular climate.
Would this be wetter or dryer? If the circulation pattern was smoother, the boundary zone might be narrower, putting the islands more reliably on the wetter, equatorial side of the line, where their latitude suggests they should be. On the other hand, the maximum height of the islands projecting out of the water would be reduced by 2000 metres, leaving only at most 800 metres of elevation to generate relief rainfall. So the remnant islands would probably be less parched, and perhaps boasting a few rivers and streams, but probably not drenched and covered in rainforest.
Edit: I have decided I don't understand the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), which had a bit part in the preceding analysis, now deleted. Most accounts of Cabo Verde's climate mention the ITCZ, which moves around nearby threatening various calamities including tropical storms and drought.
More water >> more strong current>> more storm >> wetter earth >> more erosion from rain >> flatter land mass with growing out by sediments;
More water >> more weight >> more stress on tectonic plates >> more eruption >> new land emerged
A video on how the Amazon was formed would be very interesting. From the original Amazonian craton with the river running from east to west and flowing into the Ecuadorian Pacific coast to the uplift of the Andes, with the formation of the Pebas Sea and its subsequent drainage to the northwest and west in the current basins of the Orinoco River and Amazon River respectively (after a small rise of the Vaupés arch of hills in the southwestern part of the Guianian shield which separated the waters of both basins and created the current white sands forests in the ancient beaches of the Pebas Sea). Additionally, this upheaval of the Andes in Colombia with its three mountain ranges (first the central one of volcanic origin due to subduction, then the western one due to subduction and finally the eastern one also due to folding due to subduction) and two inter-Andean valleys (product of pauses in the subduction of the Pacific plate under the Amazonian craton) divided the Amazonian fauna into a cis-Andean group (on the current side of the Amazon) and another trans-Andean (on the western side of the Andes and which includes the inter-Andean valleys of Cauca and Magdalena and the Colombian Caribbean coast) within what is today one of the most biodiverse areas on the planet: the biogeographic Chocó (in the Colombian-Ecuadorian Pacific). Many of the bird species that inhabit both sides are very similar after allopatric speciation. For example, the Amazonian Pteroglossus pluricinctus is very similar to the Pacific Pteroglossus torquatus. The same happens with Cephalopterus ornatus and penduliger from the Amazonian and Pacific side respectively. The list is huge and could give you many more examples if you decide to make a video on this topic that includes tectonic processes, orogeny of the Andes, origin of Amazon and Orinoquía, evolution of sister species of birds and an explanation of why Colombia is the country with the largest number of species of birds in the world. I have some nice articles about every item and never seen a video about it in youtube! PS: the epilogue of this story is the collision of Panama against Colombia creating the bridge that allowed the exchange of species between North and South America.
Finally someone talks about the Valle del Cauca.
Mt Ararat also managed to get dragged into Warhammer 40k franchise. Last bastion of resistance to the Earth's unification by the Emperor.
If this scenario were going to happen suddenly today, I find it interesting that the biggest cities that would survive would be Mexico City, Bogotá, Addis Ababa, Sana'a and Quito. I had expected all of them, except for Sana'a. I didn't know it was so high above sea level.
On another note, the tibetan landmass looks a lot like Roshar from the Stormlight Archive. I wonder if Sanderson had his inspiration for Roshar after a thought experiment like this one.
La Paz, Bolivia isn't that big? Peru also has quite a few even above 3000m but they're not that big
Lhasa in Tibet, china would also survive as its above 3000m.
I expected El Alto and Cusco, as they are in The Andes, with El Alto having a high population, neighboring La Paz.
I think the 'most interesting' sea level biologically would be that which puts as much of the earth as possible between 0 and 200 meters underwater. I haven't the first clue how to figure out what that level would be, but if you've got the ambition to tackle that one I'd love to see what you come up with.
200m is about the depth of the edge of the continental shelf around the continents.
If the water was around 450 m higher than today, that would put a lot of area under about 100 m of water
Sea levels were an average 170 metres higher in the cretaceous than today. there was little to no ice at the poles and continents were not having that high mountains as today.
Geography explains so much of history and is very important👏🏻🙌🏻👍🏻
Yes 🙌🏽
Hey now I'm sure many others would pay $ to see a multiple hundred hours long video of you guessing what each and every single islands biogeography would be like on this form of earth, but yeah that would take forever love the vid m8
This guy uploading this video at 4am PST? Dang, that's commitment!
Well it’s 7am EST right now and he is from New York so…
5:55 - fun fact: "Hengduan" in Chinese means "cutting horizontally," suggesting that these North-South mountains have posed a significant challenge for travellers going East-West.
Interesting fact, thanks!
I feel bad for the poor soul who first named it. (Joke)
Assuming anything like Humanity would evolve on this world, and assuming the human equivalent involves in the same location as us, the homeland of humanity would be in the Ethiopian archipelago. I'm unsure exactly how large of a population this could Foster, and if they do get seafaring, and go exploring and island-hopping like the early Polynesians, probably with a large population up in the Turkish archipelago before heading east if they ever run across Tibet their population would explode. I don't know if they would ever have the technology until steamtech to actually get to the Andean continent, but if by some miraculous chance they do headed towards what we would refer to as the new world, they're more likely to run into the Rockies and Mexican archipelagos first as there are roughly on the same or similar latitude.
What about contemporary humans? (Us, that exist right now, like you and me) how would *we* survive on this world?
@@cons9053 it would be a little tricky, but not necessarily impossible. Considering all of the lands are quite a bit in altitude, any contemporary human living on that world would have to deal with altitude sickness and or adapt. Not to mention because of radically different evolutionary paths, there would be no recognizable animal or plants to eat, so any settlers to this version of Earth would need to figure out what they could and couldn't eat. And considering most of the globe is covered in water, storms should be a doozy, but people have been dealing with bad weather since the dawn of humanity I'm sure someone living there could adapt. Since all the land is pretty much the tops of mountains, cave systems might be an option. Those don't blow down in a stiff breeze.
Good thought experiment. The only issue, and I imagine you're painfully aware of it, is that if the world had had that much water, water erosion would have been much higher and not even Tibet would have resisted it. The mountains that "survive" in your video would have either not formed or been eroded away already.
I am a match teacher. Why am I watching a geography video and why was it so interesting?
Sir take my upvote.
Mexico City is 2240 meters above sea level, most people don't know that Mexico is a mountainous country, that's why the center north is mainly desert.
Most Latin American countries that lie on the Pacific are also mountainous
@@seanthe100 More like all of them.
This is really helpful for my idea of a smaller water world with a small "archipelago cotenant" chain where amphibious flight comes before landmasses poke out of the oceans long enough to allow walking creatures. Also this video terrifies me a lot.
Green lands hidden Mountains will also be a massive continent So i would like to see a part 2 of some sorts over this sea level visualization is the best!
Yeah I’m surprised they didn’t talk about it past a quick glance at 14:32
also worht mentioning that there would be a small scandinavian arcipelago, which he didn't mention
That is taking into account the ice caps, if you remove the ice caps the landmass would be a lot smaller and be broken up into multiple islands
@@zraithbc They would rebound as well.
Two ideas in a similar vein for future videos:
1) Imagining if one or more of our modern continents were missing: no Africa, or no North America, or no Eurasia
2) Imagining if the axis of rotation of Earth was shifted 90 degrees, e.g. one end of the axis in the Pacific, the other end in Africa
"Flood" by Stephen Baxter covers this scenario very well
Had earth always had as much water as demonstrated in this video I find it highly unlikely that any land fauna and flora would develop much past the early carboniferous period, as land would be too fleeting. Everything that did evolve would have to be capable of propagating over distances of water. Land animals would be semi-aquatic or very small, and the plant life would depend on wind and water for seed dispersal. Mammals could not possibly have evolved, and I doubt that, if flight ever did evolve, that it would develop sufficiently to survive the next inundation.
Seeing the Earth with far lower sea levels would be interesting, as would speculating on what the Earth might look like with drastically different continental drift speed (if that even makes any difference) or erosion rates. Loved the video.
If sea levels had always been that high it would be interesting to see what is able to evolve quickly on land given the very temporary nature of land masses on an evolutionary and geological time scale. Perhaps we would see a lot more amphibians dominate the terrestrial landscapes.
On such time scales wouldn't it still make more sense to adapt fully to dominating the dry terrain that would exist largely the same for hundreds to thousands of generations at the very least? Amphibians wouldn't necessarily dominate coastal areas as it hasn't been dominated by amphibians by mass given more mass exists fully adapted to ocean/seas and land separately and not much that is amphibious other than swamp land.
Whales with big feet? 🐋👣🐳
Or penguins like the video suggests 🐧🐧🐧
Ok so I'm no biology expert but I am fauna enthusiast and my knowledge mostly comprised from watching yt videos😅 so I'm open open to all suggestions...
Firstly I want to mention is that whales might thrive in this ecosystem might get even larger
2) The largest big cat might be the snow leopard from the Himalayas
3) Seals , sea lions , sea otters will also be able to cpoe up with this ecosystem mostly living around those archipelago
4 ) For birds the aquatic speciation increase
Hello, first off I would like to say that you have done an amazing job! I really enjoyed watching the content and found that it was very informative and well made.
At 20:15 - 20:35 mins you asked for input about what water levels people would like you to show and talk about. In this regard, I have several suggestions for you to consider.
1. At 17:40 - 17:48 mins of the video, there is a beautiful clip of the continents separating from one land mass into their current positions. I would like to see this same illustration, but with different water levels. One at todays water levels, one with +500m of water, one with +1000m of water, one with +1500m of water, and one with +2000m of water.
I think a planet like this would have a hard time to evolve fully terrestial life. With continents that only get to ~100 million years of age before being submerged again, I would assume that amphibians, fish and arthropods would reign supreme.
Where I used to live on the west side of Nairobi was almost exactly 2000m in elevation, so it would have become beach-front property. Somehow I was expecting the Kenyan highlands to be more extensive on your new earth than they were.
Love how you use this absurd scenario to teach some fun plate tectonics in an intuitive way!
The authors and DMs are plotting.
I like this what-if scenario. Thank you for giving me ideas to work on at work!
I like to think that this water-world does exist, in another universe, and another AtlasPro has made a video saying, “What if the world had a lot LESS water? Let’s lower the sea levels by 2,000 meters. And freeze some. Wow. Look at all that land!”
0:54Me in San Francisco Bay: HELP ME I'M DROWNING
me in florida already dead when a single iceberg melts:
Imagine how would human civilization would work in this Earth. The great empire of Tibet, the pirates of the rookies. So much potential for world building right here.
let's say humans evolved to reach behavioral modernity in tibet. there would be a LOT going on in tibet. empires, migrations, wars, etc, but it would take very very long until humans ventured beyond the islands they could see over the horizon, like the zagros. crossing the atlantic or pacific would have to wait until a much later stage of technical developement or would require a much larger incentive than what enabled colonialism originating from europe.
The eurasian parte of the world would host a modernization of their people, while the américas would be land of maorí like types of civilizations, that would conquer the andeans, México and the rookies depending on the latitude
It would be horrible lots of war, migration so on
@@kyb2027 ah just like real life
Could you please make a video about ancient Martian bodies of water? Or maybe paleoareology in general? I find it fascinating that Mars had very real seas and glaciers in the past, but it's so hard to find estimates of what areas they were in exactly and how expansive they were. It's so cool to think about how the red planet changed and how it was very much like the dying world early sci-fi writers imagined, in the real past.
The reason for the Rockies being more chaotic than Tibet or the Andes has very little to do with their age or erosion. It is because of different orogenic events that created the mountains in a connected, but haphazard way, most specifically the Laramide Orogeny in the east and south (Colorado, New Mexico, Mexico) and the Sevier Orogeny in the west and north (Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Canada). The two orogenies can be traced through northern Utah where they meet. The Rockies are also unique because of the shallower angle of the subduction of the Farallon Plate under the North America Plate, causing the mountains to rise almost a 1000 miles from the Pacific Ocean, and spreading the mountain building over a broader area, and lower overall elevation, than a similar subduction in South America of the Nazca Plate being subducted.
Whst I find interesting is how much different North America would look if the mountains raised by those ancient orogenies could only be eroded down to approach sea level, how much more massive would the forms taken by later orogenies be? Surely there would be vastly more land above the higher seas than we get by simplistically increasing sea levels after millions or in some cases billions of yeas of erosion above sea level have already proceeded.
Answer to the ararat question, idk if you'll ever see this: 1) it's not certain that it was what is called ararat in modern day, and it says mountains of ararat, which is much broader. 2) the flood wasn't caused by an infusion of new water, but would've logically been produced by rising less-dense fresh oceanic crust caused by runaway subduction. The rising crust would've pushed the water of the oceans over the continents, and then as it subsided as it cooled, the oceans would've receded. In addition the continents would've been uplifted at the end of the flood, and the highest peaks were only formed late, otherwise they would've had time to be eroded. This is called the catastrophic plate tectonics model
Super interesting! I think we want a 2000 meter lower sea level example too!
And both 1000 meters higher and lower sea levels would be super interesting as well!
since this is nice "what-if" series... if we remove all the water on the earth, can we walk freely in Mariana Trench? I guess we would need a series of "adaptations" like when climbing Mt. Everest (?)
If you can hit that water bucket MLG, yes.
@@WuffiePhoenix yeah sure but i hope do a video about it.
Something no one ever talks about in relation to a warming earth is what will likely be an enormous amount of rebound. I think this will evolve some extensive volcanism. Might even change the continents themselves.
Current global warming is nothing compared to CAMP and Siberian traps
I think it’s a bit unlikely. Volcanos are caused by subduction and hot spots. Other tectonic activity either does nothing or prevents them. Like the rebound still happening in Northern Europe.
Ummm no
Isostatic rebound is being experienced in a number of Northern countries that had massive amounts of overlying ice during the last ice age. The only other parts of a warming Earth that would experience it, would be Greenland and Antarctica, to varying degrees. Only parts of Antarctica are volcanic.
...Not correct... Sorry.
Climate change is measured in 10ths of degrees. Two or three degrees of change may no sound like much, but if climate-change-theory is true, it can have massive ecological ripples throughout life. It does _not_ affect landmasses.
In order to see any rebound from thermal expansion, we would need to see dozens of degrees of temperature change, something that we couldn't do if we tried for a million years straight.
Do you think Mt. Erebus and the remaining Antarctic mountains would still retain their polar climate, even with all the moderating effects of the water surrounding and isolating them?
I'd say that the Antarctic circumpolar current would likely still prevent much heat from migrating in from warmer waters. The question of polar ice sheets didn't come up in this video, but I'd imagine that they'd have a significant impact on the climate and biogeography in a world with so little land.
@@Deadlyish The Antarctic Circumpolar Current wouldn't exist without the massive circular landmass directly covering the pole. Such a world wouldn't have an ice cover at all, especially given that water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas. We're only in a temporary glacial period now because of the unusual land configuration (Antarctica blocks water from reaching the south pole, while Eurasia and North America are mostly blocking currents from reaching the north pole). Throughout most of Earth's history, there was tropical vegetation at the poles.
I think it would be the reverse: without the poleward deflection of low-latitude water and the presence of hot-summer continental regions, polar climates would probably extend to 45 degrees or so (with the possible exception of southern Andea). I realized this when imagining a world without the largest continental mainlands (for example, most of the British Isles having a tundra biome).
I from Dominican Republic, we have the highest mountains in the Caribbean being the "Pico Duarte" the most highest with 3,175m (9,610ft) located in the "Cordillera Central". Taking into account this scenario, it would be the only place in the Caribbean that would remain in surface added to other small surrounding archipelagos in the mountain range, in what was once the island "Hispaniola".
Congratulations, you've successfully (sort of) re-created One Piece planet.
Great video as always as seen with the intro
Btw, if you have time, can you perhaps do a geography or cover of planet mercury's terrain in the future? I havent seen a lot of people doing that and I thought it would be a good topic to cover
Well, Mercury is a dead planet, meaning that it doesn't have tectonic plates or volcanic activity. It's surface is like our moon's surface: Full of craters, no life and no atmosphere
It's just a boring rock that could be used to mining due to it's amounts of iron, copper and steel
Great video! Would love to see the other way round. And see what land masses emerge if sea level drops by 10m 100m 1000m
Andes also had steep angle subduction as opposed to a more shallow angle. This is why the rockies cover the entire western USA and central america while the andes are a thin band along western south america. The rockies had very shallow subduction angles.
1000 meters would be cool!
Also, some fiction writer has now been provided with a fictional planet... this would be a really cool planet!
I love the first minute of the video he’s talking about how riding the sea levels 70 meters doesn’t do all that much, while casually showing that all of Florida is underwater.
I’d really like to know what effects the shallow seas formed by the former continents would have on marine ecosystems.
Or could with tweaking the water level.
I feel in terms of biology, some kind of flying animal group would dominate, as birds dominate isolated Pacific islands as nesting grounds today. Some kind of flying group, whether reptiles, mammals, birds or even fish (as in the Future is Wild) would be able to potentially traverse the distances between some of these island groups and nest there, creating unique island biogeography like with dodos in our world. Great video, and really fun to think about.
The Sierra Madre Occidental and the other Sierra Madre's ranges are the few places in Mexico where the climate is somewhat temperate and has the correct conditions for high-altitude forests to appear. These would be a collection of regions where the most varieties of pine and oak trees would be located; alongside animals such as cougars, deers, armadillos, opossums, racoons, golden eagles, hummingbirds and rattlesnakes. Overall, without considering much of the geological and climatological events that would lead to this region to become its own archipielago, I suppose it would remain a template (maybe a bit more 'mediterranean' considering the increase in warm oceanic currents) zone with warm summers and moderately cold winters, both with humid conditions; small trees, epiphytes and some vines which dweel in the mountains alongside medium to big sized nocturnal and or crepuscular animals.
And if I had the chance to choose one random but nonsensical elemento to preserve in this region, is that part of the Sierra Madre Occidental is the habitat where the monarch butterfly spends winters. So I'd love to see this part of the world be its last bastion and a new home where really beautiful and impressive speciation proccesses for this butterfly to occur for generations.
That's really cool to imagine this butterfly undergoing adaptive radiation over many millions of years in that context
They may spend their winters there but their birth and growing are spent in areas that would be underwater in that senario, so they wouldn't last long.
As a Dutchman, we will stand our ground, literally.
That much additional water adds an insane amount of weight. I can see much more violent eruptions and seismic events. These in turn could make life turf side much more difficult.
Great video! Raises lots of questions about the possibilities of life in this waterworld. With so much less fauna (even if there was an abundant plant life on what land remains), how would that affect O2 and CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and thus the oxygen breathing animals on Earth?
Would those valleys carved out by the Salween, Mekong, and Yangtze rivers be considered fjords in this flooded hypothetical, or would they be considered rias? Perhaps discussing the difference could be an interesting video topic for AtlasPro
All fjords are rias, but not all rias are fjords.
As the river inlets are not caused by glasiers, they would probably be called rias as you said.
I think what makes a Ria a ria is they are much shallower and don't have the steep mountain sides like Fjords, but in practice both are flooded river valleys.
I've never heard of a 'ria' but these here would be called 'sounds', i.e. flooded river carved valleys as opposed to 'fjords' - valleys of glacial origin
@@edmundbasham67 Sounds are not geographically defined well, Rias are almost always flooded river valleys.
@@Radnugget
Case in point: the area we locally call the Sound is actually part of a series of fjords. According to Wikipedia, the drainage basin near some of the coastal towns is a Ria.
Puget Sound and Gray's Harbor for anyone wondering.
Hi! If it's not too complicated to explain, what did you use to make the sea rise visualisations?
For a couple years now I've had the idea floating around the back of my mind of trying to world-build an earth with raised sea levels, but rarely found conclusive/detailed/expansive maps to get an idea of the lax of the land (for example for 60m higher sea levels) ^^'
It's in the description
@@penguinpenguinpenguin thank you! I genuinely should've seen that sooner 😅
I learnt more in this 20 minute video then a whole year of school
imagine living at a 2,001 meter elevation and just watching water fill almost everywhere around you
The real question is: What happens on most planets with water where the ocean is 500 to 5000km deep?
How much water is required to sink Everest?
5000 km is too big
500 km is still too big
50-300 km is just right
@@terraspace1100
Why is one amount too big, and what makes the other amount "just right"?
Also, isn't a factor of 300/50= 6 _still_ completely crazy? 🤔
Especially considering that the average ocean depth is 'just' 3.7 km...
Even for the 'low' number of 50 km, you'd _still_ be adding 13.5 times the depth!!😲
Your reply did make me look this up; Earth's radius is 'only' 6,371 km.
So adding 5000 km of ocean would basically double the radius.
The circumference would then be 71,446 km instead of 40,075 km.
The area would be 400 million km2 instead of 127.8.
The volume increase would be _massive,_ ending up at 6,158,636,731,595 km3, compared to now 1,083,206,916,846.
So you'd have to _add_ *five whole Earths* worth of comets 😮
I have _no idea_ what that would do to Earth's gravity, and will leave that math up to you 😂
(but, since water is less dense than rock, I'd expect it wouldn't change _that_ much, right?)
This is a great concept for a series of videos. I’d watch one on 1000m, 500m, or even if you reduced sea level. A -1000m would be incredibly interesting. Great video
Out of curiosity, how big of an icy meteor would we need to collide with our cute little Earth to cause such sea level rises? How much bigger than the first water delivering meteor would it need to be, and would the collision of such an iceball with our planet be an extinction level event, or just be a case of let's see what survives the giant tidal waves, assuming impact site is somewhere in the pacific or on the poles?
Without any scientific data at hand, i would say it could be a moon sized object, which did not do an impact, but would be slowly absorbed by the earth.
Big enough to… let’s say *rearrange* the entire crust for several tens of millions of years
It would really have to be an enormous series of meteors. These would have to be relatively small as their speed alone would cause a heck of a problems before reaching this much water.
The first? There were countless numbers of icy bodies adding to the already present water content.
Besides, the surface area of all our oceans, multiplied by 2 km depth, arriving as a large mass; accounting for it's larger volume from being expanded ice? Those tsunamis would be whole continents being liquefied by raging kinetic energy, as the whole planet gasps in one big "OH FUCK".
Considering he's essentially adding s bubble of water that surrounds the entire earth while being some 1900 meters thick on average, this comet would have to be motherfucking huge to add all this water. With its collision, it would probably blow a huge amount off the planet, and thus make up for that. So probably around 1.5 x the size of mercury, with mostly ice/water making it up. Like 90%, I think.
Edit: I way underestimated how big mercury is, this is probably more like a 2 volumes of Pluto rather than 1.5x mercury in mass.
Man, I would love a one hour episode about earth's geography with -1000m sea level!
Specifically the southwestern pacific is so fascinating to me.
Dude u just kiled 99.99 % of humanity
This reminds me of Evacuate: Earth doc about the world covered by water due to an ice comet crashing the moon, resulting a ring of ice falling to the gravity well of Earth.
very cool video.
it would be cool if you had also talked about antarctica and greenland since theyre pretty elevated.
was thinking the same thing :)
Is the atmosphere in this scenario "pushed up" or is the air pressure at 2'000 meters kept the same as it is now?
I find myself wondering the same thing. I think the atmosphere would be pushed up because the gas is less dense than liquid but what then? Consider this, if the volume of the atmosphere stayed the same then the sea level rise would cause the atmosphere to become thinner. This would mean the column of air overhead would be shorter than present which would mean lower atmospheric pressure. But would that really be the case? The surface of the Earth would be 2000m closer to the Sun and the ocean tends to reflect less light than the land perhaps resulting in more heat absorbtion than present. That could cause more evaporation and water vapor so therefore a thicker atmosphere with a higher pressure. Then again that would cause more clouds to form. Clouds would reflect a lot of light.
Air pressure will barely be affected as the atmosphere is simply 'pushed up'; Earth radius is over 3000x the sea level radius so no real effect on the volume. Herb Stalkens is absolutely right though, the increased surface area covered by ocean will cause a large drop in albedo ie. cause Earth to become much less reflective, absorbing more solar energy and becoming significantly hotter and more humid. The tropical storms I imagine will be very, very intense on this planet.
This was a surprisingly informative and enjoyable video :)
If Water World ever gets remade, they should hire you as a technical consultant.